Barack Obama’s Paragraph

Barack Obama knows he’s a man running out of time. Reflecting on his presidential legacy in a long interview with the New Yorker’s David Remnick, Obama said, “at the end of the day we’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.” For Presidents' Day, Politico Magazine asked a panel of distinguished historians to take up the obvious question this raises: How will Obama’s paragraph read? Did he get it right? What will be his place in history? Here’s what they told us, with some smart framing thoughts from Stephen Sestanovich, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations and Columbia University:

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The American political system is designed to make presidents seem important. They pick their teams, their goals, their fights—and if they do these things skillfully enough, we say they’ve made history. This is what Barack Obama seems to mean by getting his “paragraph right.”

Yet most of the choices that presidents make are defined by circumstance. Some things they might like to do are impossible; many successes fall into their laps; some setbacks are not their fault. Our leaders can pick many things, but not their moment in history. Obama partisans make this point incessantly. Consider, they urge, the terrible problems their man faced—two wars, a deep recession, political gridlock and so on. Shouldn’t we grade him on a curve?

To cut through the confusion about how to rank our presidents, a friend of mine argues for a popular method of evaluating baseball players—“Wins-Above-Replacement.” While paying attention to context—to the political equivalents of weather, ballpark size and the other side’s strengths and weaknesses—“W.A.R.” measures how much a single athlete (or statesman) adds to the team’s (or the country’s) bottom line. If America’s big slugger were taken out of the line-up and someone else had to fill in, what would happen to our national win-loss percentage?

“Wins-Above-Replacement” is an excellent parlor game for the historically minded. It makes clear that success does not always depend on who’s in charge. Take one of the legendary achievements of American foreign policy, the Marshall Plan. Almost 70 years later, Harry Truman still gets immense credit for committing the United States to help rebuild Western Europe. But why? All of his advisers supported the effort. They agreed that America had to act, or the Soviet Union would exploit European chaos. Replace Truman with someone else from the bench, in other words, and you’d still get the Marshall Plan.

You might not get other things, however. A year later, when Soviet leader Josef Stalin cut access to West Berlin, Truman wanted to save the city with a massive airlift. The Pentagon brass were completely against it; State Department experts, like George Kennan, pooh-poohed the Soviet military threat to Western Europe; and American allies, especially the French, worried that a showdown over Berlin might make only Stalin more belligerent. The president ignored them all. In the 1948 season, Truman’s “Wins-Above Replacement” score was off the charts.

In judging Barack Obama, scholars will naturally try to disentangle individual impact from historical context. All the horribles he inherited make this a necessary effort. But we shouldn’t overdo it. The problems presidents face on taking office are not merely a set of constraints on what they do. Big problems create big opportunities; they shape the way presidents use their power, the way they understand themselves and their ultimate aspirations. Baseball players can’t change the game. Politicians can.

The hand Obama was dealt has defined his presidency in many ways, and readers of Politico Magazine will immediately recognize one of them—the centralization of policy-making in the White House. There’s a reason Obama is so frequently compared to Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. For all three, the first order of business on becoming president was to bring ends and means into balance after a period of costly excess and chaotic decisions. In different ways, all sought to rebuild White House dominance over the rest of the executive branch. Going to war, it seems, doesn’t centralize power half as much as coming home does. The same is probably true of economic policy too. You can get into trouble in lots of different ways; getting out of trouble requires a firmer hand on the tiller. (That’s why Rahm Emanuel said a crisis was “a terrible thing to waste.”)

Increased presidential power, it should be said, does not mean taking on large new projects. In times of adversity and discouragement, presidents look for easy victories—to show their ability to act, to lift the national mood, to change the subject. Eisenhower insisted the specter of nuclear war was too great a burden to expect the public to bear it for long. He experimented with various remedies, from splashy diplomatic initiatives to appeals for national prayer. A cautious man, he warned his advisers against excessive caution.

Nixon had a similar instinct. He knew how easy it would be to “fall into [the] dry rot of just managing the chaos better.” His solution: “get going, take risks, be exciting.” Henry Kissinger lectured his small-minded White House colleagues in the same spirit: “The people want hope, not just blood, sweat, and tears all the time.”

Barack Obama, his poll numbers reaching new lows, doubtless hears similar advice about how to put his presidency on a better trajectory. He is right to think that the attention-getting, leadership-demonstrating, mood-lifting, subject-changing impulse has often led to bad results. (For Eisenhower and Nixon alone, it set in motion the Bay of Pigs, the invasion of Cambodia, wage and price controls and the Christmas bombing.) But he might also worry that someday describing the presidency as a little “paragraph” is going to seem an overly downsized conception of the office. With only three years to go, won’t he too want to “be exciting?”

Historians who try to rank the 44th president in our national pantheon are surely going to ask why he has not made better use of his “bully pulpit.” It’s become common to ask where Barack Obama the electrifying speechmaker has gone. But if we compare him with other presidents who managed economic crises or the aftermath of major wars, the mystery starts to clear up. Neither Eisenhower nor Nixon was, to say the very least, considered a great communicator. Add Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush to the group, and the pattern is hard to miss. When America’s national fortunes turn downward, our presidents usually seem pretty inarticulate.

Loss of oratorical zing can’t be explained, moreover, by the familiar pundit trope about politicians who, once elected, have to “govern in prose.” That’s not how John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan governed. You could argue that, for all their troubles, Bill Clinton and even George W. Bush made good use of their pulpit too.

Yet all these presidents had the wind at their back, both at home and abroad, for most of the time they occupied the White House. You have to go all the way back to Franklin Roosevelt, in fact, to find someone who turned hard times to rhetorical advantage. Obama has not yet put himself in that company. Why has he not used his inspirational gifts to become a stronger president? Historians trying to answer this question might start by remembering how many of his predecessors have also fallen short, and why. Talking your way out of a jam is a lot harder than it looks.

Stephen Sestanovich is author of Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama, just published by Knopf. A professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, he served in both the Clinton and Reagan administrations.

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ABOVE AVERAGE

Douglas Brinkley | Rice University

The very fact that Barack Obama—an African-American—was twice elected to the presidency will always be the lead line in that hard-to-meld, gold-plated paragraph. There is no bigger Obama accomplishment than his encouraging women and minorities that they, too, can win the White House, that the traditionalist glass ceiling can be shattered with grace, dignity and unflappable integrity. He’ll receive high marks in history for appointing two women to the Supreme Court, defending gay rights, saving General Motors and extricating American troops from Iraq. His greatest long-term victory is Obamacare—pulled off under fierce blowback from the Republican right. (The act will potentially save millions of lives.) On the most important issue of our time—climate change—he’ll be seen as an educator more than a leader. However, if he has the wherewithal to say no to the Keystone Pipeline and offer permanent protection for Alaska’s National Wildlife Refuge by declaring it a national monument, he will earn his environmental epaulettes. At the end of two terms, historians will want to see unemployment hovering below 6.5 percent—a reasonable indicator that progress was made on fixing the post-Great Recession economy. On the foreign policy front Obama—winner of the Nobel Peace Prize—will, ironically enough, be honored for killing Osama bin Laden and overseeing the controversial drone program. Whether he can fully extract America from Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay remains to be seen. Overall, he’ll be ranked above average, in league with James Monroe, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton.

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A MAN WHO PROMISED TOO MUCH

Margaret MacMillan | Oxford University

After the divisive domestic and aggressive foreign policies of Bush the Younger, America’s friends and neighbors welcomed the election of the Democrat Barack Obama. The advent of the first black president in American history seemed to show that Americans were finally overcoming their deep racial divisions; his stated aim of bringing medical care to poorer Americans suggested that the United States was moving closer to the inclusive social policies of northern Europe and Canada. In terms of foreign policy, Obama promised to wind down the open-ended “war on terror” and to renew efforts to bring peace in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Europeans were less pleased with the president’s obvious lack of interest in their continent or with what turned out to be an abortive “pivot to Asia.” Obama promised much, perhaps too much. As Nigel Farage, the British prime minister at the time, memorably remarked after his only summit with the president, “Fine words butter no parsnips.” For all Obama’s eloquence, the United States remained deeply divided—by race, class and ideology. He was handicapped, too, by a polarized Congress, by his own unwillingness to consult widely and by an increasingly intractable world situation. His presidency marks the beginning of the end of American hegemony and the rise of our present benevolent China-Japan condominium.

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THE NEXT TAFT?

Jeremy D. Mayer | George Mason University

The first African American to rise to the presidency, Barack Obama was historic even before his first inauguration. His primary achievement in domestic policy was to begin the long process of nationalizing America’s health insurance industry. His attempt to harness market forces to provide universal coverage, while unsuccessful initially, ushered in further government involvement in health care at the individual level. In foreign policy, he wrapped up two of America’s least popular and least successful wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan. The cost of these wars, financially and in terms of global stature, was extremely high and lingered for decades, but blame for them tends to land on Obama’s predecessor, Bush the Younger (sometimes styled today as “the Dimmer.”) Late in his presidency, Obama also ended more than 60 years of isolationist policy toward Cuba with a bold trip to Havana. Post-presidency, Obama was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Hillary Clinton, becoming only the second president (William Howard Taft being the other) to be chosen for the high court.

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EVERYTHING DEPENDS ON HIS SUCCESSOR

Sean Wilentz | Princeton University

Barack Obama will obviously be remembered as the first African-American president. He will be remembered for inheriting a potentially catastrophic financial emergency and laying the groundwork for recovery. His chief legislative accomplishment, should it hold up, will be the enactment of national health care, a momentous feat. He will be remembered as a president who, with the best of intentions, tried and failed to end stark, acrimonious polarization in Washington. If a treaty is secured with Iran, that will be remembered as his foremost achievement in foreign affairs. There is, however, an enormous caveat. Obama’s reputation, to an unusual and perhaps unprecedented degree, will depend on whom the voters choose as his successor. If a Republican wins the White House in 2016, Obama’s landmark achievement of national health care will almost certainly be destroyed. If a Republican wins, there is a good chance that his financial and economy strategy will be undone. And history will not be on his side. Since the Civil War, each time a Republican has succeeded a consecutive two-term Democratic presidency—Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy/Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton—progressive policies have suffered severe setbacks. In each case, enough survived to sustain the president’s historical importance. The prospect for Obama, though, is even more precarious: Should a Republican succeed him, his signal triumphs will likely be thoroughly repudiated, rendering him a two-term president who left, at best, a meager legacy—and virtually guaranteeing him, apart from his honored place as the first black president, a mediocre standing in history.

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A STABILIZING FORCE

Robert E. Bonner | Dartmouth College

All future paragraphs depend as much on what will follow the Obama presidency than on what we know during it. But one plausible paragraph that could offer a post-2017 summation would be the following:

Barack Obama’s presidency established a pattern of “executive stability” of the post-Reagan presidency, making a consecutive eight-year hold on the White House the norm achieved by four of five presidents over the 1981-2017 span. Over his two terms in office, the young president faced post-financial crisis turmoil in the economy and bitter partisan strife fueled by new media and a conservative revolt against the established political order. Sluggish jobs growth consumed far more public attention than did the foreign policy challenges that had figured centrally in the presidencies of Reagan and both Bushes. Obama’s lasting achievement in health care reform was hard-won and came with a steep political price. By contrast, an increasing national acceptance of gay rights seemed to come far easier than the president himself would have imagined at the outset of his presidency. Obama’s inability to achieve bipartisan solutions to environmental and immigration issues (not to mention the growing economic disparities in American society) meant that an array of profound challenges would be left to his successors.

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A LIBERAL STANDARD-BEARER HE’S NOT

Beverly Gage | Yale University

Barack Obama secured a major place in history the moment he was elected as the nation’s first African-American president. His re-election to a second term only reinforced his significance, refuting any suggestion that 2008 was a crisis-driven anomaly. Outside of the electoral sphere, his record turned out to be much more mixed. When Obama arrived in office, pundits predicted a great new age of American liberalism. (Time magazine put Obama on its cover dressed as Franklin Roosevelt, smoking a long, thin cigarette.) Unlike Roosevelt, though, Obama brought few structural changes to American government, even in the midst of financial and economic crisis. During his first two years, with the help of a Democratic Congress, he pushed through major health care legislation, his signal achievement as president. After the 2010 midterm elections, his range of possibilities narrowed dramatically, and he found his presidency hampered by partisan conflict. Obama’s significance as the standard-bearer of a new political generation was never in question, but the much-predicted new age of liberalism never came to pass.

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THE ANALYST IN CHIEF

Jack Rakove | Stanford University

Barack Obama entered the presidency with modest personal experience of governance and a bold, if terribly naive, vision of how American politics might operate. The Democratic majority that elected him had to choose between two images of their candidate. The more popular one cast him as a natural supporter of all the liberal causes that had gone into exile as Republicans controlled the presidency or one or both houses of Congress; the other portrayed Obama as a coolly analytic thinker, one who resisted easy solutions and was comfortable wrestling with complex problems. Over the course of his presidency, the model of the analytical leader proved the better description of the political leader Obama became. His efforts to coopt ideas that had flourished in Republican and conservative circles as the basis for comprehensive health care legislation could not overcome the deep, bitter and even racist opposition and antipathy that his presidency faced. On other issues, his willingness to compromise with Republicans proved equally futile, for his presidency coincided with and indeed encouraged a remarkable epoch of internal turmoil among the opposition that will take several more elections to sort out. Under these conditions, the adoption of the Affordable Care Act remains his most visible domestic achievement. Yet the analytical dimensions of his presidency, most evident in his conduct of foreign policy, provide another legacy for historians to admire. Like other presidents, Obama found the daily reporting of the national security situation to be a profoundly educational experience—but also one for which his analytical intelligence was well suited. Ending the American involvement in Iraq, avoiding the catastrophe of the Syrian civil war and even pushing a stubborn Israeli government toward negotiations were important marks of this intelligence. On balance, Obama’s presidency was less transformative than his supporters hoped it might be. But given the political hand Obama was dealt by the economic catastrophe of 2008 and the turmoil of his opponents, it is difficult to see how he could have been much more effective, even had he enjoyed the superior political skills of his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton. Perhaps most important, the very fact of his election as the nation’s first African-American president remains a milestone in the history of the republic.

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HE ENDED THE WARS, BUT…

James Goldgeier | American University

In the paragraph dedicated to Barack Obama’s presidency, one sentence will encapsulate his foreign policy: He ended the wars he inherited and avoided new ones. From 1989 to 2001, the United States averaged one major military intervention every 18 months. In the years that followed, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan consumed significant American blood and treasure. The Clinton and Bush administrations believed the use of U.S. military force was essential to American leadership and actively intervened to save populations and promote human rights and democracy abroad. Obama dramatically changed that narrative with a far less assertive foreign policy in places like Syria. His last-minute decision to intervene in Libya, while “leading from behind,” is the exception that proves the rule. His supporters say Obama turned the page on the Bush administration’s headlong rush into a foolish war in Iraq, extricated the United States from a failed war in Afghanistan and avoided new quagmires. His critics argue Obama made military intervention an all-or-nothing proposition, thus leaving the Syrian people, among others, to a terrible fate. Overall, the president has yet to outline a national security strategy for the United States that includes a clear statement of U.S. priorities, a realistic assessment of resources and a vision for post-hegemonic American leadership. “I don’t really even need George Kennan right now,” Obama declared recently to the New Yorker’s David Remnick. Actually, he does—but not for a bumper sticker slogan like “containment.” Rather, the president needs to articulate a long-term strategy for American leadership in an increasingly complex world.

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HE’S NO LBJ

James T. Kloppenberg | Harvard University

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, he faced a severe financial crisis, wildly unrealistic expectations from his supporters and bitter opposition from conservative critics. Three notable achievements marked his presidency: An $800 billion economic stimulus package, opposed by moderate Democrats and almost all Republicans, prevented the recession from becoming a depression. Landmark health care legislation, which Democrats had been trying to enact for a century, became law. Long and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan came to an end. Of course, something unanticipated could happen in the next two years, and decades must pass before historians can assess Obama’s legacy with any confidence. Yet three predictions seem safe. First, those who expected him to arrest spiraling economic inequality, wipe away decades of animosity against all forms of government social provision or expunge the centuries-old stain of racism will be disappointed. Second, those for whom this mixed-race former community organizer and law professor embodied of all they hate about the new America will be distressed that, despite their best efforts, the economy grew modestly throughout his presidency, universal health insurance survived all attempts to scuttle it and many Americans came to realize that U.S. military intervention cannot solve all the world’s problems. Finally, historians will see more clearly than many contemporaries that although Obama accomplished less than his predecessors FDR and LBJ, he confronted an even more deeply polarized political culture and never enjoyed the overwhelming Democratic congressional majorities that made possible their most notable achievements.

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IN A WORD, OBAMACARE

Lizabeth Cohen | Harvard University

Democratic President Barack Hussein Obama, served two terms (2008-2016) as the 44th president of the United States. His election as the biracial son of a white American mother and Kenyan father was historic for putting the first African-American in the White House. Ironically, in a neck-and-neck race for the Democratic nomination, he defeated Hilary Rodham Clinton, who would also have made history had she won the election, in her case as the first woman president. Obama’s election marked a new level of achievement in the long and troubled legacy of slavery in America, though racial prejudice still fueled a disturbing portion of the American citizenry’s opposition to the president. Obama faced many challenges upon taking office, most inherited from his predecessor, particularly a recession more devastating than any since the Great Depression of the 1930s and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that had proved draining of men and resources and seemingly unwinnable. He threaded a careful path in attacking these problems, bold in some ways (such as bailing out the bankrupt Detroit auto industry and withdrawing American troops from Iraq) and moderate in others (disappointing his liberal supporters, for example, who hoped for much more re-regulation of Wall Street after the recession). His signature legislative victory was the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), which had the potential to expand significantly the capacity of the American welfare state but whose adoption was plagued with political compromises and whose implementation suffered from serious errors. This pattern of good intentions waylaid by a polarized and uncooperative Congress (due particularly to the paralysis of the Republican Party induced by its right-wing “Tea Party” faction), combined with the legislative inexperience and personal remoteness of the president characterized much of Obama’s time in office. While he will always be remembered in history as the president who proved through his election that American democracy worked, he will also go down as a president whose effectiveness was limited by obstacles to American democracy that he proved unable to overcome, either through force of personality or skill as a lawmaker. In terms of where Obama will stack up against his 20th-century predecessors, I would put him closest to Bill Clinton. In terms of the sweeping legacy of his policies, he was no Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, but if Obamacare proves successful in the long run, his sponsorship of it will secure him an important place in American history.